The channel

The IBM example - Social network structure enhancing business growth.

2011-09-02T02:03:00.000+01:00

Social tools have helped to changethe way people interact. In businesses, “smart” companies have taken advantageof these social tools; forming communities of their clients/consumers. Theygained from these communitie's products/service criticism and better understandingof the needs of their clients; an information which has helped them evolveproducts/services that now satisfy their clients.

Many other smart companies have used socialtools(networks) to form talent communities – a way of filtering interested contributorswho are knowledgeable about their kind of business and are useful potentials inforging ideas that would move their businesses to new heights.

But how does this social networking “structure”(we really mean the “structure” not the social network itself) apply directlyto business growth? To answer this, we ask another question; what has drivenmost social networks to popularity?

Ease of use

Interoperability

Sharing

While “ease of use” and “interoperability”are already parts of most companies plan for particular products or services, thenot so new (yet most overlooked) strategy is sharing.

Smart companies have alreadyimplemented sharing as a means to quicklypopularize their products and services. Sharingin this context simply means to take responsibility together. It means creating products and servicesthat other companies can share in. Take IBM for example with its partnerprogram that creates millions of dollars in revenue for partners sharing in the IBM experience. IBM produces world class software and hardwarethat its partners can market around their region. Some partners complete theIBM products more by building software that runs on the hardware or hardwarethat utilizes the software. IBM goes a step further by helping their clientsall the way through by been part of any negotiation process if partners need anexpert to shed more light on the IBM product in questions.

One might begin to see businesssharing as an IT thing or like the traditional business distributorship; it ismore. For a company to share products/services effectively, thatproduct/service must first be complete on its own while having the ability toaccept a third party plug-in – essentially for a new functionality. As anotherexample, facebook and the Zynga app; and a lotmore in power generation, banking, etc.

Research and development teams mustbegin to design innovative products/services that are sharable i.e. products and servicesthat have responsibilities that can be shared by potential clients/partners.

The concept of Sharing implemented onany product/service gives room for third party innovation (creating room forthe much needed openness on your product/service); which creates new use foryour product/service, new market you don’t need to compete in and quickly popularizesyour brand.

GETTING THE RIGHT INFORMATION FOR A PROJECT - RESEARCHING (PART 2)

2011-04-04T00:07:00.006+01:00

Research involves gathering the right information you’ll need to complete your project. No one is an island of information and No one man has all the information needed to sustain his life talk less of satisfying others.

The truth is that all human beings see things from different perspective. My perspective of up might be someone else’s upside down. So keeping in mind that our soft solution will be used by different people with a whole lot of different perspectives, we need research that will bring the views of a whole lot of different people.

Some of the easiest ways to get this kind of information for your solution include (but are not limited to) the following:-

Try brainstorming with other neutral minded people on this project. They could see the project from dimensions you never imagined.

Brainstorming should be done in a way that the bias if it exists at all is insignificant and the contributor gives his true and creative input. For instance, The extent to which you get true constructive (or Destructive) criticism over an issue differs if your friend or family was criticizing you on one side and some government policy on the other.

Meeting with Clients - Meetings with clients should be detailed. For each meeting, you must have a clear issue you intend to get an answer; and you must get it. With this new information, brainstorm and have a new meeting till all issues are crystal clear.

It is better to go through this process no matter how painstakingly it goes than providing an incomplete work to the client that makes you look unprofessional with no attention to detail. Most clients forget to tell you everything so you will need to bring it out of them.

To aid these meetings, you could draw up a mock up of your current understanding of the system and have them add, delete or modify the system as you see it until they (the clients) are satisfied. So many open source tools are available for designing soft project models or layouts ( we talk about these in the last part of this series).

Meeting with Experts - Experts could be people who have probably implemented a similar project or people who are authorities in this field you are working to implement a solution.

Talking with experts gives you the first hand opportunity to see your project from an even more practical side. They have been there and they know at least most of the hurdles there might be.

They are good at advising on the best platform to work on for scalability, The kind of programming paradigm to implement for robustness and could show you bottlenecks you never envisaged.

BEGINNING A SOFTWARE PROJECT - THE BASICS. (PART 1)

2011-04-03T23:53:00.002+01:00

To begin any project in any field, research is key. How large the research gets definitely varies on the size of the project. Good project research prior to project implementation will always :-

Save time - When goals are clearly seen and written down, the very next step in the way is known. No time is lost due to the fact that an unforeseen road suddenly pops up and you have to re-evaluate several thousand lines of codes.
Save cost - An athlete who runs into an unseen hurdle in an Olympics loses the race with broken bones (Double tragedy). You will be so shocked to realize how much an hour lag costs your business. That your competitor was able to deliver a project just as yours in less the time lies in the minutes you spent trying to re-evaluate implementation of an incomplete research which accumulated into hours and days and weeks; then you lost to your competitor.

The key in every project research is to find out specifics that will guide you to implement the project THE RIGHT WAY THE FIRST TIME. Some questions that if answered guide you in this light are:-

• How long do I have till I deliver this project.

• Am I absolutely (not assumed) clear on the needs of my client.

• Am I absolutely clear on what my project needs to solve.

• Which sets of people am I designing for - (are people with disabilities users of this system).

• What tools are important to implement this project from designing to deployment.

• Do I have the knowhow or do I need Experts.

• Has anyone implemented this kind of project previously.

NB: It must be done right. Doing it right means satisfying your client.

In the part two if this series, we evaluate very simple research techniques to help you get the right information you need to complete that project.

Interesting facts (JESUS IS ALIVE believe it or not)

2010-05-29T01:25:00.002+01:00

.... BE SURE YOU SCROLL WAY DOWN TO SEE WHAT THIS MESSAGE HOLDS FOR YOU!!!! YOU JUST MIGHT BE SURPRISED!!! I WAS!!!

DID YOU KNOW

THESE FACTS?

SURE DIDNT TILL NOW

Death

is certain but the Bible speaks about untimely death!

Make a

personal reflection about this.......

Very

interesting, read until the end.....

It is

written in the Bible (Galatians 6:7):

'Be not

deceived; God is not mocked:

for

whatsoever a man sow,

that shall

he also reap..

Here are some

men and women

who mocked

God :

John Lennon

(Singer):

Some

years before, during his interview with an American Magazine,

he said:

'Christianity

will end, it will disappear.

I do

not have to argue about

that...

I am certain...

Jesus

was ok, but his subjects were too simple, today we are more

famous than Him' (1966).

Lennon, after

saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ,

was shot six times.

Tancredo

Neves (President of Brazil

During

the Presidential campaign, he said if he got 500,000 votes

from his party, not even God would remove him from

Presidency.

Sure he got

the votes, but he got sick a day before being made President,

then he died.

Cazuza

(Bi-sexual Brazilian

composer, singer and poet):

During

A show in Canecio ( Rio de Janeiro ),

while

smoking his cigarette, he puffed out some smoke into the air

and said:'God, that's for you.'

He died at

the age of 32 of LUNG CANCER in a horrible manner.

The man who

built the Titanic

After

the construction of Titanic, a reporter asked him how safe the

Titanic would be

With

an ironic tone he said:

'Not

even God can sink it'

The

result: I think you all know what

happened to the Titanic

Marilyn Monroe

(Actress)

She

was visited by Billy Graham during a presentation of a

show.

said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her.

After

hearing what the Preacher had to say, she said:

don't need your Jesus'..

A week later,

she was found dead in her apartment

Bon Scott

(Singer)

The

ex-vocalist of the AC/DC. On one of his 1979 songs he

sang:

'Don't

stop me; I'm going down all the way, down the highway to

hell'.

On the 19th

of February 1980, Bon Scott was found dead, he had been choked

by his own vomit.

Campinas (IN 2005)

Campinas , Brazil a group of friends, drunk, went to pick up a

friend.....

The

mother accompanied her to the car and was so worried about the

drunkenness of her friends and she said to the daughter

holding her hand, who was already seated in the car:

'My

Daughter, Go With God And May He Protect You.'

She

responded: 'Only If He (God) Travels In The Trunk, Cause

Inside Here......It' s Already Full '

Hours later,

news came by that they had been involved in a fatal accident,

everyone had died,

the car could

not be recognized what type of car it had been, but

surprisingly, the trunk was intact.

The police

said there was no way the trunk could have remained intact. To

their surprise, inside the trunk was a crate of eggs, none was

broken

Christine

Hewitt (Jamaican Journalist and

entertainer)

said the

Bible (Word of God) was the worst book ever written.

In June 2006

she was found burnt beyond recognition in her motor

vehicle.

Many more

important people have forgotten that there is no other name

that was given so much authority as the name of Jesus.

Many have

died, but only Jesus died and rose again, and he is still

alive.

'Jesus'

PS:

If it was a

joke, you would have sent it to everyone.

So are you going to

have courage to send this?.

I have done my

part, Jesus said

'If you are

embarrassed about me,

I will also

be embarrassed about you before my father.'

You

are my 8 in 8 seconds. I am not breaking this. No way!

I'M

TOLD THIS WORKS!!!!! Bishop T.D. Jakes '8 Second Prayer.' Just

repeat this prayer and see how God moves!!

'Lord,

I love you and I need you, come into my heart, and bless me,

my family, my home, and my friends, in Jesus' name.

Amen.'

God Bless Us.

Becoming the most successful Employer or the best Employee ever. Thoughts from real life.

2010-05-15T01:03:00.001+01:00

Ok so you woke up and decided " I need to have my own kind of business" or you have actually been thinking on this idea for a long time?

As almost everyone will tell you Rome was not built in a day though some Romes are built more suddenly than others. Some builders also find building their Rome an interesting process while others struggle through it with lots of regrets in the end.

One of the most famous richest person in the world at age nine had completely gone round the world by completely going through an encyclopedia - no wonder he was able to create a solution used all around the world. Another did not eat for forty days and Night and after that, did things that HE became known around the world thousands of years after HE died.

You can begin by asking yourself some basic questions.

1. What do I like doing - Organizing; accomplishing a task you were given; seeing the most crucial tasks and the best ways to go about them

2. Are you determined or stubborn; take responsibility or find the sacred cow; Really hard working or a bit lazy.

3. What am I actually best at doing – Organizing; accomplishing a task you were given; seeing the most crucial tasks and the best ways to go about them.

4. Are you able to see the outcomes of your actions i.e. are you actually able to see where you want your next action to end? in other words do you "TRY" to set the circumstances so that they end at particular outcome or do you let the circumstances determine your final outcome?

5. Are you passionate about solving an existing problem or just making money and becoming famous.

6. Can you take risks; you know, like stare a bull in the face?

By now you should already easily see if you want to just stick with a high payer like Procter and Gamble or the likes and just enjoy life because they will expect you to accurately accomplish a task you were given and you should be able to blame someone once there is a failure. You will need to follow the company policy they set out and earn a very fat salary with benefits at the end of every month.

Your personality will define if you will eventually become a CEO or you will stop before you get there. It will also play a major role in determining how people will deal with the company you eventually establish. For instance, are you a person of integrity i.e. will you be able to deliver what you say you can deliver; Do you uphold high standard or do you just get the job done anyhow;

Becoming the CEO is actually just the beginning; becoming a successful CEO is where the real task lies. Statistics show that 90 percent of new companies pack up before year 10. Getting the right employees in your company that are able to look around their environment and ask the right questions that challenge your company to provide the right solutions will be one of the factors that will sustain your company.

Recently, the sponsors of twitter one of the largest social networking sites threatened to stop their support if the management of twitter could not create a way to make money out of the site. One person saw the dream; another is needed to keep it running from day to day.

For all new companies, a simple thing to do will be to Try to copy and implement an already exiting ideas. This will definitely be easy but will only always put you in second to the original owner of the idea.

From basic analysis, someone who is Determined, is Focused, is Passionate about solving a problem, can take risks, Really works hard at doing what they enjoy doing and is able to organize his facts to put together the right information almost usually finds building a successful "Rome" an interesting process instead of a task they struggle on with lots of regrets.

Whatever kind of Rome you intend to build, try to see if doing what you enjoy doing solves a problem existing somewhere around you. Or maybe you'll just get the right training then work for the perfect company.

Some people just enjoy making a company work; they actually become the back bones of those companies. others enjoy been the ones that set up the company bearing all the risks and absorbing a lot of tension.

Either ways, we will be able to give our own quarter in making the world what it is now or will be in the future.

Someone once realized that he strived on trying to tackle challenges. He realized that when he got challenged, he could think out of the ordinary to create solutions that seem impossible or sometimes seemed irrelevant at in that era; but he always saw these ideas been implemented within a few years sometimes months after. This was key to determining what I wanted to do. Yours might be something else but whichever place you decide to be, make sure it is what makes you fulfilled.